Agents of Enedis, manager of the public electricity distribution network, mourn one of their own. Saturday November 4, at the end of the day, a technician lost his life. According to our information, this father of three children died of electrocution during an intervention in the Breton town of Pont-Aven (Finistère). He had come specially as reinforcement from the South-West, from his operational base in Auch (Gers), to repair the damage caused to the network by storm Ciaran. This mobilizes around 2,400 technicians in Brittany and 1,000 in Normandy, since the night of 1er to November 2.
Among them, in addition to local agents and service providers, 900 are Enedis employees from other regions of France. These volunteers are part of the rapid electricity intervention force, a contingent set up after the violent storms of December 1999. On November 5, their efforts had already restored power to more than 1 million homes – today -there, at the 6:30 p.m. count, there were still 114,000 without electricity.
A second storm, Domingos, requires additional personnel. On the night of November 4 to 5, it struck other departments on the Atlantic coast, in particular Charente-Maritime and Gironde. Sunday 5, at 7 p.m., Domingos deprived just under 50,000 homes of electricity – compared to 160,000 at the start of the day, before the intervention of 1,000 employees and service providers of Enedis, a 100% subsidiary of the public group EDF.
“The company is really in shock”
On November 2, the CGT mining and energy union federation welcomed the” commitment ” and the “humanist values” of all the agents involved, “whatever the weather conditions”while already calling on employers to ” organize [la] protection » and to ” to guarantee [l’]physical integrity “ teams.
After the tragedy of Pont-Aven, the mayor (without label) of the town, Christian Dautel, paid tribute to these agents, in the daily newspaper West Francefor their work “ at night, in completely dangerous conditions with gusts of wind and rain, in the cold and the mud”. The Quimper public prosecutor’s office announced to AFP the opening of a judicial investigation into the circumstances of the death.
“The company is really in shock”declares Jean-Philippe Lamarcade, regional director of Enedis in Brittany. “The energy sector is in mourning”writes Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister of Energy Transition, on X (formerly Twitter).
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